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General discussion (archive)Double Fine EPIC FAIL at budget management(570 posts)(570 posts)
(570 posts)
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This is my favourite topic
Posted July 03, 2013
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Crassmaster: What board game Kickstarters are you looking at? A large number of them have been enormously late, or turned out to be disappointingly bland products that people likely wouldn't have spent the same amount on if they'd seen the rules before buying in. Some have been good games, but it's obvious why many of them were passed on by big board game publishers.
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keeveek: Yeah, the smaller projects can turn out to be bland and nothing special, but for example, Zombicide? One of the biggest board games kickstarters ever and one of the most successful games?

It even got published in Poland by a regular publisher! And it's a major hit even though it's expensive as hell.
To be honest, it isn't the greatest game. In fact, it's a great example of something that was funded primarily because they kept shoving more plastic in the box. It's okay, but nothing great. And the initial ruleset was a complete disaster.
Posted July 03, 2013
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lukaszthegreat: because someone worked for free it does not mean it didn't have budget.

Opportunity cost. By working for free how much he not earned if he spent that time on working for pay. add this to whatever was spent... wonder how much it was.
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Novotnus: That's probably hard to calculate... But, another bit of trivia - I remember reading Dave Gilbert (who lives from running WEG) statment about second Blackwell game's budget being $800.
easy to calculate if they had provided information. I make 20 bucks an hour. if i spent 5 hours on something else i am not making 20 bucks per hour therefore the cost of doing something else is 100 dollars (minus tax of course, pension payment, healthcare)

Blackwell games budget being 800 dollars is a meaningless statement.


I wonder about costs of those games because I really doubt they costs more than 200-400K dollars. Therefore I can't imagine where those 2.5M dollars went. Inexile already showed us gameplay from Wasteland. Obsidian featured some tech showcase (not much. i fear they will be the next who run out of money.)

what did DF show (serious question. not a backer so I care only about final product therefore was skipping over other news)



Broken Sword got only 800K. wonder what it means for them....
Posted July 03, 2013
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Red_Avatar: On top of all this, most people I talk to, didn't demand a top-end adventure game with fancy animations and suchlike. They wanted a charming adventure game in the old Lucas Arts style with wonky graphics, witty and funny dialogue and some good puzzles. What I've seen of the game so far, is the wrong kind of wonky for starters so I'm not holding my breath to even get a game anywhere near what I expected IF it ever gets released.
I really think this is the root of the problem. DF saw the higher budget and misunderstood what people wanted. So they tried for a bigger game than was feasible.

Plus, DF has never seemed like a studio that really has a grip on the numbers. So we'll see.

I backed it, but not heavily, and I'm not going to spend energy being upset about this.

EDIT; Oh, and I have to wonder if the time and money spent on the development documentary is part of the problem. Video editing, etc, isn't cheap. And it means graphic artists have to spend time doing the videos instead of working on the game.
Post edited July 03, 2013 by HGiles
Posted July 03, 2013
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fracturedsanity: If they were linked with a publisher and announced this to the public everyone would be cheering Double Fine for increasing the project's size, but upset at the possibility of it not coming out.
Most of the anger would be with the publisher itself.

Instead we have a crowdfunded project that seemingly ineptly went over budget because it increased it's scale, and most of the anger seems to be coming from people who aren't even invested in it.
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Red_Avatar: Apples, oranges. You only increase the scale if you can afford it. The money they had, was set right from the start. Unlike many devs, they knew exactly how much they could spend so they had all the cards faced up on the table. Let's look at the facts:

- they got many MANY times the budget they wanted.
- they are fully in charge of what to fund, how to fund it and how much to fund it.
- they have full knowledge of every aspect since there's no publisher involved.
- they have full freedom of which direction to head in so no publisher making them do u-turns on certain aspects

Basically, they had an IDEAL situation for making a brilliant game - they had the funds as well - and the end result is a game that will take many times longer to complete (which is fine by me) but also several times the truly MASSIVE budget it already received!!!

On top of all this, most people I talk to, didn't demand a top-end adventure game with fancy animations and suchlike. They wanted a charming adventure game in the old Lucas Arts style with wonky graphics, witty and funny dialogue and some good puzzles. What I've seen of the game so far, is the wrong kind of wonky for starters so I'm not holding my breath to even get a game anywhere near what I expected IF it ever gets released.
Oh I'm not defending the cockup, and I agree with most everything you mention, but the vitriol of some of the people I see that aren't even involved in the funding is pretty amusing.
Posted July 03, 2013
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Regarding the posting of this "backers only" thing, I'd like to voice my opinion: that asking the public to fund your game, blowing the millions of dollars they give you, asking the public to fund another game while keeping discretely silent about the money you've already wasted, waiting until that was done with, and then finally telling the people who backed the first game that you wasted their money, but don't tell anyone, it's a secret, is completely intollerable. If they had a traditional publisher, this would be between them and that publisher, but as long as they're expecting the public to fund their games, the public can very well be informed when things go wrong, "backers only" be damned.
Post edited July 03, 2013 by BadDecissions
Posted July 03, 2013
If a company publicly asks for money to do something, I don't see anything wrong with letting people actually know what's going on, whether they invested or not. If you want to have trade or game secrets, fine, that makes sense, but if you need to hide (backers only!) the nuts and bolts of how you do business...
Posted July 03, 2013
Sadly, it happens.
Posted July 03, 2013
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lukaszthegreat: what did DF show (serious question. not a backer so I care only about final product therefore was skipping over other news)
You can see what type of updates there were on the backer site, it's viewable publicly, with the updates themselves restricted for backers only.

I like how (if I'm not mistaken) this has been asked for the first time on page 13, with 12 pages of mostly non-backers convinced they blew all the money and did nothing.

Oh yeah, but they've been playing assorted adventure games throughout on that "game club" thing, so it wasn't just booze and hookers all the time!
Post edited July 03, 2013 by MoP
Posted July 03, 2013
I can see why Ron Gilbert booked it after The Cave released...Perhaps he saw the writing on the wall?
Posted July 03, 2013
Kickstarter needs a "kick" button, letting backers (for a small fee) hire a specialist to kick the project heads in the butt a specified number of times, send them a severed horse head, ring their doorbell and run away - that sort of thing, not necessarily in that order of tiers.
Posted July 03, 2013
I love internet drama.
Posted July 03, 2013
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Crassmaster: To be honest, it isn't the greatest game. In fact, it's a great example of something that was funded primarily because they kept shoving more plastic in the box. It's okay, but nothing great. And the initial ruleset was a complete disaster.
I'm not talking about opinions here. People like it, and it's all that matters, imho. And it sells.

People wanted plastic, and they got plastic. Not like with Double Fine - people wanted an old school adventure game - they got concept arts that look nothing like a classic adventure game and now they got nothing.
Post edited July 03, 2013 by keeveek
Posted July 03, 2013
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Crassmaster: To be honest, it isn't the greatest game. In fact, it's a great example of something that was funded primarily because they kept shoving more plastic in the box. It's okay, but nothing great. And the initial ruleset was a complete disaster.
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keeveek: I'm not talking about opinions here. People like it, and it's all that matters, imho. And it sells.
Agreed. But WHY did it sell? More stuff in the box. The rules weren't even available for people to look at until the very end of the campaign, so it couldn't have been the game itself. There's absolutely nothing wrong with that, either.

And with people paying insane prices on EBay for the Kickstarter exclusives, that drove a lot of the sales of their second campaign. Again, it has less to do with the game itself than with trying to make a few bucks re-selling it down the line.

Both are perfectly fine. But it just goes to show that Kickstarter has next to nothing to do with the quality of a game.
Post edited July 03, 2013 by Crassmaster
Posted July 03, 2013
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jamyskis: So if Tim cocks up in a similar fashion with Massive Chalice and neither of the games see the light of day, and if backers end up taking the company to court, does that mean they'll be Double Fined?

Sorry, I'll get my coat...
LOL, actually that's the best one so far.
Posted July 03, 2013
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jamyskis: So if Tim cocks up in a similar fashion with Massive Chalice and neither of the games see the light of day, and if backers end up taking the company to court, does that mean they'll be Double Fined?

Sorry, I'll get my coat...
Seems like we are about to turn the "Double" into a meme.
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General discussion (archive)Double Fine EPIC FAIL at budget management(570 posts)(570 posts)
(570 posts)